AM Gold - Early-'60s Classics

Artists

Album Info

Release Date: 1996

Labels: Warner Special Products, Time Life Music

Time-Life released this disc as Various - Superhits - Early-'60s Classics (SUD-19) in the Super Hits series in 1992. Track 6 on Superhits is "Puppy Love".

Time-Life reissued this disc (in its original pressing) as Various - AM Gold - Early-'60s Classics (AM1-20) in the AM Gold series in 1996. Track 6 on the original pressing of AM Gold is "Puppy Love".

Time-Life reissued this disc again (with RE-1 in the matrix number) as Various - AM Gold - Early-'60s Classics. Track 6 on the RE-1 reissue of AM Gold is "A Little Bitty Tear".

Track durations obtained from software.

Complete liner notes:

Connie Francis and Brenda Lee were the top female stars of the early 1960s, but that is basically all they had in common. Francis, a former child accordion player and Northeastern city girl, is usually depicted as the personification of the era when rock 'n' roll was going soft, as the sort of teen idol created by industry power brokers. She favored ballads and standards, which were ideal for her pop singing style. Lee was Little Miss Dynamite, a Southern belter whose talent had been supporting her family since she was 13. Her ballad style was remarkably gutsy and often raised eyebrows for being "too mature." Both Lee and Francis, however, scored with country ballads in the early '60s.

From late 1960 to late 1962, Brenda ran up a string of eight top-10 hits, including Fool #1. Aspiring writer Kathryn R. Fulton had mailed her composition The Biggest Fool of All to Doyle and Teddy Wilburn, a popular Nashville duo who also ran management and publishing operations. They passed the tune along to Decca Records head Owen Bradley, intending for him to produce it with a new artist they were grooming named Loretta Lynn.

Bradley liked the song but wanted it for Lee. Decca's New York office thought it was too country for her but released it anyhow (the title was changed during Lee's sessions). Around the same time, Lynn, who had scored once on an obscure West Coast label before moving to Nashville, enjoyed her first real success with a song called... Success.

Francis' "country" record, Everybody's Somebody's Fool, was actually co-written by Brooklynite Howie Greenfield. Inspired by a just-completed European tour, Connie told Greenfield she wanted a country song she could sing in more than one language. What he came up with was a Lavern Baker-type blues ballad, but Francis speeded it up to create a country shuffle along the lines of Ray Price's Heartaches by the Number. It became her first American No. l hit and the international hit she wanted.

Softer sounds, often with a distinct country or folk lilt, also thrived in the early 1960s. Among the several Elvis imitators, Detroiter Jack Scott stood out, and Burning Bridges happened to be the last top-10 entry of his career. But Joe Dowell was the quintessential flash-in-the-pan Presley clone. Nashville producer Shelby Singleton was due to go into the studio with the University of Illinois radio-TV student the next day when he saw Elvis singing Wooden Heart-an arrangement of the traditional German song Muss I Denn-in G.I. Blues, and decided to have Dowell record the song.

There were already four versions on the market, and Presley's was a hit in England and much of Europe. But Singleton, learning that Wooden Heart wouldn't be released as a single in America, cleverly substituted a bass and organ for the tuba and accordion Elvis used and had Dowell sing it, like Presley, half in English, half in the original Hessian dialect. Dowell's version reached No. 1 in the U.S.A.

Johnny Burnette was a bona fide Memphis rockabilly star from the '50s. But by the time he cut You're Sixteen, he had moved to Hollywood and become more of a country-pop singer. The song was written by Bob and Dick Sherman, later responsible for the Mary Poppins sound track. Country singer Bob Luman turned to rock in the wake of Elvis, enjoyed one hit in Let's Think about Living, then found a niche back in the country field.

Buzz Clifford got his record contract by winning a New Jersey talent show, and when his first release stiffed, he turned to the novelty Baby Sittin' Boogie, complete with his producer's son and daughter goo-gooing in the background. The Everly Brothers hit Ebony Eyes, written by Nashville craftsman John D. Loudermilk, joined Walk Right Back as that duo's biggest-selling two-sided single.

Among folkies, the Brothers Four were University of Washington frat boys who went top 5 with Greenfields, managed a couple more minor hits and disappeared. The Springfields also had only one major hit, but their breakup spawned the solo career of Dusty Springfield. The group's name was supposedly dreamed up by siblings Mary and Dion O'Brien one spring day as they were rehearsing in a field near their Hampstead, London, home. The renamed Tom and Dusty harmonized on this electrified update of Silver Threads and Golden Needles, which they knew from an old Wanda Jackson album. Though the record washed out entirely in England, it became a pre-British Invasion hit in America.

Then there were the guitarists. Jorgen Ingmann played Charlie Christian-style jazz guitar in Danish dance bands before discovering Les Paul in the 1950s. From there it was a short step to rockers like Apache. Though the tune was better known as the maiden million seller by the Shadows, Britain's most enduring instrumental group, Ingmann's was the only version of the two to chart in America. Duane Eddy was the homegrown king of guitar instrumentals, and Because They're Young was his second hit film theme. Dick Clark starred in the movie of the same name as a high-school teacher, and Duane and his band put in a cameo to play the title song.

Gene Pitney's (The Man Who Shot) Liberty Valance was also a film theme, for a John Ford western with John Wayne and James Stewart-but the recording was finished too late to make the sound track and was released as a single on its own. After Big Girls Don't Cry, the 4 Seasons cut a follow-up that echoed the theme while reversing the gender. As the group was recording Walk Like a Man in a New York hotel, firemen battling a blaze on the floor above had to break down the door to get the musicians to evacuate.
Paul Anka wrote Puppy Love for Annette Funicello, with whom he was having an affair during a package tour the two were on; Annette's bosses at Disney insisted the romance be kept quiet. After the tour, Annette cut an album called Annette Sings Anka, then up and married his manager.

Johnny Crawford parlayed his role opposite Chuck Connors in television's The Rifleman into a brief singing career launched with Cindy's Birthday. The Platters revived one of the classics of the prerock era in Harbor Lights, while Bobby Vinton's Blue on Blue was an early effort from a writer who would soon have his own share of standards: Burt Bacharach. Brook Benton and his collaborator Clyde Otis reworked a traditional piece into The Boll Weevil Song, and Gene McDaniels' Tower of Strength was one of the pop-soul hits that helped pave the way for Motown.

The early '60s was also a time for novelties, and Walter Brennan's Old Rivers and Larry Verne's Mr. Custer were two of the biggest. The former-a cornball recitation about a mule, a farmer and a little boy-was the brainstorm of Hollywood producer Snuff Garrett. After being nixed by Johnny Cash, Tennessee Ernie Ford and Tony Curtis, the song went to Walter Brennan, then heading the cast of TV's The Real McCoys. Brennan was so out of his element that writer Cliff Crofford stood in the studio using hand signals to speed him up and slow him down.

Larry Verne was an actor working as a darkroom assistant in a photographer's studio down the hall from the office of writers Fred Dorian, Al DeLory and Joe Van Winkle-former members of a failed group called the Balladeers-when they stumbled across the idea of Mr. Custer and turned it into a song. Believing it required the talents of an actor rather than a singer, they recruited Verne to cut the demo, which they then decided was good enough to release. It took them 10 months and many rejections to find a record company that agreed, but the single went to the top of the charts to become Verne's one and only hit.

-John Morthland